Richard Robinson writes: | On Sun, Feb 02, 2003 at 08:47:18PM +0000, John Chambers wrote: | > | > The main problem with making such a suggestion is that most | > of the suggestions I've gotten for enhancements have been | > based on the assumption that I have all the abc sitting on | > the disk. ... Anything | > that requires searching through the tune collection would | > take several days. ... | | Just out of interest, how long do you guess it would take to | actually grab all the ABC you're indexing (and how big would it | be) ... do it once and it would speed searching through them up.
The search currently takes about 2.5 days. I don't have a good estimate of the total size of all the files (and it would take me about 2.5 days to find this number ;-). | The problem of which, apart from resources, is cacheing obsolete | versions ... maybe a protocol, or convention, or something, for | grab-an-ABC-*if*-it's-changed, would be useful ? Actually, that's not difficult. All web servers return the modification time of files, whether you ask for it or not. I suspect that I could actually cache all the online abc (that I've found so far). There are some interesting things that could be done with this. The main reason that I haven't experimented with this is the feeling that it would be overly presumptuous. The online abc sites are somewhat personal collections, and I think the diversity is rather a good thing. The interesting thing to do with it, in my mind, is to experiment with accessing the abc web sites as they are, in whatever form their owners may keep them. And I've often encouraged people to experiment with their site's layout. Gathering it all onto one machine is the way that people have done things for decades. But working with things on the Net as they are is a somewhat new thing, and interesting to experiment with. There's also the "personal" issue. Many of the online abc collections are clearly very personal collections. Some of them (such as Jerry Holland's site) are new music that really shouldn't be copied as a whole without permission. It's true that google caches much of the web, and nobody much complains (except for the Scientologists ;-). But they don't actually *do* anything with their cached pages. It's just a form of backup (and only lasts for a few months). But then, some abc sites have disappeared. In a few cases, I do wish I'd nabbed a copy first. But I think I'll keep working mainly on finding things to do with online abc where it is, and let others deal with copying it all to their disks. Trying to actually use the Net as a live, interconnected system is more interesting than downloading everything and working off a local disk. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
